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While at State, Clinton chief of staff held job negotiating with Abu Dhabi

Getty ImagesBy Rosalind S. HeldermanFor the four years that Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of
state, her longtime friend and adviser Cheryl D. Mills served next to
her as chief of staff. Clinton has said Mills helped her run the State
Department’s sprawling bureaucracy; oversaw key priorities such as food
safety, global health policy and LGBT rights; and acted as “my principal
liaison to the White House on sensitive matters.”During her
first four months at the State Department, Mills also held another
high-profile job: She worked part time at New York University,
negotiating with officials in Abu Dhabi to build a campus in that
Persian Gulf city.At the State Department, she was unpaid in
those first months, officially designated as a temporary
expert-consultant — a status that allowed her to continue to collect
outside income while serving as chief of staff. She reported that NYU
paid her $198,000 in 2009, when her university work overlapped with her
time at the State Department, and that she collected an additional
$330,000 in vacation and severance payments when she left the school’s
payroll in May 2009.The arrangement, which Mills discussed
publicly for the first time in an interview with The Washington Post, is
another example of how Clinton as secretary allowed close aides to
conduct their public work even as they performed jobs benefiting private
interests. Another key Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, spent her last six
months as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff in 2012 simultaneously
employed by the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global charity, and a
consulting company with close Clinton connections. Similarly, Mills
remained on the Clinton Foundation’s unpaid board for a short time after
joining the State Department.

Mills’s situation raises questions about how one of the State
Department’s top employees set boundaries between her public role and a
private job that involved work on a project funded by a foreign
government. The arrangement appears to fall within federal ethics rules,
but Republican lawmakers have accused Clinton of allowing potential
conflicts of interest at the State Department.In the interview,
Mills rejected the suggestion of a conflict. She said her employment
status was approved by career professionals at the State Department and
was arranged because she initially intended to serve as Clinton’s chief
of staff only briefly before returning full time to her job as general
counsel at NYU, where she had worked since 2002. Her goal, she said, was
to help Clinton transition to her new role and then hire her own
replacement.

“Here’s what I do: I try to understand the rules and follow them,”
she said. “And I try to make sure that I’m disclosing my obligations. . . .
Our government anticipates that there will be occasions where people
are working outside, so they are earning outside income and doing other
things. What they do is have a framework for how you actually need to
follow those rules. That’s certainly something I try to do.”She
added: “I don’t know if I’m ever perfect. But I was obviously trying
very hard to make sure I was following those rules and guidelines.”

Mills reported her NYU income on public federal disclosure forms.She
did not reference the Abu Dhabi element of her role on the forms, which
ask only that employees identify the sources and amounts of their
outside income.

When asked whether a State Department ethics
officer had reviewed the specifics of her work on the Abu Dhabi project,
she did not directly answer. Instead, she said that generally the
ethics office “gives everybody advice and guidance on their things,
because anybody who is an employee who is coming in might have any
number of things that require guidance.” A
State Department spokesman indicated that Mills was not required to
file a financial disclosure form for the period. In any case, the
disclosure she filed for 2009 reflected the outside income and was
signed by an agency ethics officer after she had joined the department
full time.Under ethics laws, employees are prohibited from
participating in matters that would have a direct and predictable effect
on themselves or an outside employer.Mills said she didn’t
“recall any issues” at the State Department that would have required her
to consider recusing herself and said she would have consulted with the
ethics office if one had come up.Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, declined to comment.Mills’s
service on the board of NYU’s campus in the Middle East was first
reported in June by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site.
But the extent of her work on the project during those months has not
been previously reported.

Mills, 50, has been a trusted adviser to Clinton and her husband
since she went to work for Bill Clinton’s White House as a young
Stanford-educated lawyer, and she later helped defend the then-president
during impeachment proceedings. She has largely kept a low profile,
providing legal counsel and other advice to the couple, including
working for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. She rarely
grants interviews.In recent months, Mills has emerged as a
central player in various controversies that have dogged Clinton’s 2016
presidential bid.She was one of few staff members who knew from
the beginning about Clinton’s decision to use only a personal e-mail
account as secretary of state. She oversaw last year’s process that
determined which e-mails from Clinton’s account were considered
work-related and should be turned over to the State Department for
public release and which were personal and could be deleted. And, last
month, she testified for nine hours behind closed doors before the
Republican-led House committee investigating the 2012 attacks on U.S.
diplomatic sites in Benghazi, Libya.Committee Democrats have indicated that they will release a transcript of Mills’s testimony this week.

Mills’s decision to join Clinton at the State Department in 2009 — as recalled by both women — was a difficult one.“She
told me she would help with my transition to State but did not want to
leave NYU for a permanent role in the government,” Clinton wrote of
Mills in her book “Hard Choices.” “Thankfully, she changed her mind about that.”Clinton
also described how she had come to rely on Mills’s counsel over two
decades. “She talked fast and thought even faster; her intellect was
like a sharp blade, slicing and dicing every problem she encountered,”
Clinton wrote. “She also had a huge heart, boundless loyalty, rock-solid
integrity, and a deep commitment to social justice.”Mills, in
the interview, said she could not, at first, envision doing the job
while also devoting herself to her twin children, who were 3 at the
time.

But she said that Clinton is “a very persuasive woman” and that she found a way to balance the job with her home life.Although
a chief of staff typically would be part of the Senior Executive
Service, Mills was for her first four months assigned a lower federal
rank of GS-15, a designation more commonly assigned to career employees.
She was given the higher executive rank when she became a paid employee
in May 2009, earning $177,000 a year.The distinction was
important: Federal regulations limited outside income allowed for senior
executive officials, while there was no limit on GS-15 employees. In
2009, the cap for Senior Executive Service employees would have been
about $26,000.Mills’s disclosures and Federal Election
Commission records show that, in addition to her payments from NYU, she
collected $60,000 from Clinton-related political action committees in
her first weeks at the State Department. She indicated that the
compensation reflected work completed before she began as chief of
staff.Mills said she was not aware at the time what designation
the State Department had given her. “I had to sit down and say: ‘Look,
I’m not intending to stay. I’m going to be working part time, and I’m
ultimately going to transition out. And I want to make sure that
whatever is the right way to do that, I do it that right way,’ ” she
said.In recent years, more than 100 State Department employees
annually have typically been granted a designation that allows them to
hold outside employment, including scientists, foreign affairs officers
and Abedin, a senior ­adviser. But experts said that a dual employment
arrangement is rare at the chief-of-staff level and that the nature of
Mills’s non­governmental work made her situation even more atypical.“This
is exceedingly unusual, perhaps exceptional in the history of modern
federal bureaucratic leadership. I’ve never seen it before,” said Paul
C. Light, an NYU professor who has studied government employment in
depth for decades and is a former head of the Center for Public Service
at the Brookings Institution.“I’m
amazed that anyone would take on such a wide-ranging agenda and live to
tell about it, especially given the competing demands on her time and
the sharp boundaries between the worlds she had to navigate,” he said.Richard
W. Painter, who served as a White House ethics lawyer under President
George W. Bush, said Mills’s work probably complied with the law,
provided she did no work at the State Department that would financially
affect NYU and its overseas campus.Still, he called the
appearance of the arrangement “problematic” and said he thinks it would
have been best handled if State Department lawyers were “closely
monitoring” Mills’s responsibilities for NYU and the university’s
interests around the world.“At this level, that you would make
someone a GS-15 and yet have them continue to be a lawyer for a large
academic institution or a large law firm — that I’ve never seen,” said
Painter, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.Beth
Wilkinson, an attorney for Mills, said in an e-mail: “When Ms. Mills
began her public service at the State Department, she followed the
ethics rules. No one disputes that she disclosed her work with NYU to
the department and that the ethics office reviewed and certified her
disclosure form, finding she had no conflict of interest.”For Mills, part of the quandary, she said, was that she loved her work for NYU.At
the time, her focus was on opening NYU’s campus in Abu Dhabi, a project
administered by the private university but, according to NYU, funded by
the Abu Dhabi government. Mills had worked on the project since it was
announced in 2007, and it remained in the planning phase as she entered
the State Department in 2009.Mills said her responsibilities
included negotiating free-speech provisions for students and faculty
members, navigating how same-sex and unmarried couples could work at the
university given the country’s conservative laws, and working to ensure
labor protections for workers constructing campus buildings.The
talks took place, she said, with “quasi-governmental if not
governmental” officials designated by the Abu Dhabi-owned investment
company that was developing the campus.The issues were difficult
because the culture of the United Arab Emirates “is very different than
ours,” she said. “So when you are taking a university like NYU and
placing it in an environment that has different laws and different
customs and different rules, there’s a whole set of different
challenges.”The UAE has in recent years become one of the United
States’ most important allies in the Middle East. The relationship is
complex, however, in part because of human rights concerns in the gulf
nation. Abu Dhabi is the UAE’s capital.Mills said she decided to
take no pay from the U.S. government during her first four months as
Clinton’s chief of staff, because she considered the job “a matter of
service.”

Both
during and after the four-month period of Mills’s dual employment,
there were occasions when she seemed to function as a conduit between
NYU and her State Department boss.After Clinton spoke at an NYU
graduation ceremony in New York in May 2009, a top university official
e-mailed Mills to thank her for her “help and guidance” in getting
Clinton to the event, according to correspondence recently released by
the State Department.In 2011, Mills forwarded to Clinton an
e-mail she had received from a university official describing a new NYU
campus planned for Shanghai.NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus accepted its
first students in 2010 in temporary quarters before moving to a newly
constructed campus. Last year, the New York Times reported that
construction workers at the site had been mistreated, in violation of a
2009 statement of values adopted by NYU that was to govern construction.
NYU apologized and promised to investigate.In May 2014, the school held its first graduation in Abu Dhabi, and Bill Clinton delivered the commencement address. John
Beckman, a spokesman for NYU, called Mills a “highly valued, respected
and hard-working member of the senior leadership team at NYU” who worked
on “important projects” during her seven years with the university. The
arrangement has drawn the attention of Republican lawmakers such as
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), who has criticized Clinton for allowing
her top aides to work for private entities.Grassley said
Mills’s work on a foreign project adds pressure to the State Department
to release more details about her roles, including any ethics agreements
that governed the arrangement.“The public should have the
information to know whether the State Department properly manages
conflicts of interest,” he said in a statement. “The rules are meant to
ensure that the public comes first and that no one is taking unfair
advantage.”Mills declined an offer to join Clinton’s 2016 bid
and now runs her own company building businesses in Africa, offering
advice to the campaign, she said, only informally. “While I
appreciate she is someone who has an outsized public persona, she’s also
a very real human being and someone who is very near and dear to my
heart,” she said. “So I do my best to be a good friend.”